Dirty Old Men!

Unfortunately, if you're not a UK resident, it's unlikely that you will have heard of "Time Team", but I will still make this interesting, despite the fact that I'll be talking about a long running British show, which involves old men in shorts clawing in the dirt for fragments of pottery. You see, the Time Team arrive in some quiet village where there is good reason to believe that there was an ancient settlement. In fact they know that there was a settlement and where it was as well. But then they dig there. They have 3 days to find out as much as they can. So far so good.

Not this week though. The Time Team were in Normandy, following the exploits of the 1st Dorset Regiment during D-Day, World War II. My first problem with this is, it just wasn't that long ago was it? They even had one of the old soldiers with them to make it more plausible. The excavations would look at German positions taken by that regiment during D-Day.

Here's my second problem. Prior to D-Day, Hitler had the foresight to send some crack young soldiers to bolster the older gentlemen manning the defences, because clearly they would have cracked early in the day otherwise. British intelligence found out about this move, but kept it from the men for fear it would reduce morale. So, the British are heading up through a field to take a position on the ridge, when they were opened up on from the front and side by hidden German machine-gun emplacements. They were fairly decimated in this attack, which I assume might have sapped their morale slightly more than had they known what to expect.

Never mind. The Dorsets won the day and those men made a glorious sacrifice to capture what Time Team referred to as an unfinished anti-tank gun emplacement, that would have wrought heavy damage on the British forces, had it been completed.